I wanted to see which company had the most LinkedIn members in Poland (Hungary or Czech) so I used these location filters and went to ‘All companies’.

In Poland, it is a company called ‘Zakład optyczny’ with more than 12K employees and that – as I do not speak Polish – sounded like such a nice, large and decent local firm.

The first strange finding, however, was seeing one of my colleagues’ profile listed under this firm… Marta surely works for Randstad so I checked this company in Google and realized these words were not referring to any company but simply to the word ‘optician’. Certainly, Marta is not an optician and it is even more certain that there are no 12K Polish optician users on LinkedIn today. What is going on??Read the rest of this entry »

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Facebook has got a ‘See friendship’ function which is meant to show your mutual friends with any of your friends. You can easily find it on a friend’s timeline.

The scary thing is that this feature (its URL) can be applied for any of the Facebook users so it can be a rather powerful sourcing tool when looking for colleagues, peers and other employees of a company! Facebook, we love you! 😛

Let’s say we are after support engineers at Microsoft in Netherlands…

As we need at least one name (candidate) for a start go for LinkedIn and do a quick search. You will get some good results by using a basic search string but say, it is not enough for now. You want to find more of these guys or even more: you want to find all of the support engineers at MicrosoftNetherlands.Read the rest of this entry »

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The only thing that makes a sourcer optimistic is the belief that people make mistakes.

I have been trying to source from Facebook for quite a long time and it has always seemed to be a mission impossible for me. However, the hope that one day we will be able to identify candidates from that 800m+ Talent Pool made me simply too hungry and desperate to not give it up.

Here I share a few new tricks – which I believe have not yet been discovered before – how to retrieve the publicly available data on Facebook.

(While it is nice to imagine we are dealing with secret intelligence here it would be way too ambitious to say we are doing any hacking on Facebook.)

But can a Talent Scout/Sourcer be fully responsible for the hire if the recruiting mix contains more channels than only the traditional direct (‘passive candidate’) sourcing? Certainly not!

If it is not necessary the hire that makes a Sourcer successful (recognized?) what is the measurement of their success? And vica versa: if a Sourcer seems to be not efficient enough what is the measurement that will tell you why your Sourcer has got stuck?

With my ever first INFOGRAPHIC I present some new measurements that you can apply. I have been working with them for a while and if you are comfortable with this data-driven approach it can be a rather helpful tool to quickly understand where your colleagues are.

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It is not a game changer trick but a rather helpful one if you directly want to search within your #in connections’ connections.

Why do I think it is worth for sharing?

Often, #in profiles remain hidden from us as they do not contain the keywords we are using in a search. With this trick our search can more rely on someone’s network (aka current and former colleagues) and bring all the profiles who we may have missed when using a string.

By having a basic #in account (which I do so) we usually much narrow the search to get not more than 100 profiles. With this trick we can work from a higher-quality candidate pool so that the narrowing will be easier and more precise.

For agency recruiters, it is a very smart way to see which other agencies an HR person has been already connected with… Ouch! 🙂

For corporate recruiters, it is helpful to see and search for someone’s network from the competition.